Novella a Day in May 2023 – No.2

/ madamebibilophile

Winter in Sokcho – Elisa Shua Dusapin (2016 trans. Aneesa Abbas Higgins  2020) 154 pages

Day 2 and I’m delighted that yesterday Simon at Stuck in a Book posted that he’ll be joining me with his #ABookaDayinMay, surely adding many more titles to my TBR mountain 🙂

The narrative voice in Winter in Sokcho is an intriguing one: detached yet painfully intimate, ambiguous yet pragmatically clear. A nameless young woman records what happens to her, but it is up to the reader to decipher the meaning.

She works in a hotel in out of season Sokcho, a coastal tourist town sixty kilometres south of the border with North Korea. It is not a glamorous hotel even in peak season:

“Orange and green corridors, lit by blueish light bulbs. Old Park hadn’t moved on from the days after the war, when guests were lured like squids to their nets, dazzled by strings of blinking lights.”

“I loved this coastline, scarred as it was by the line of electrified barbed wire fencing along the shore.”

A guest arrives at the hotel, a French graphic novelist named Kerrand. Slowly he and the woman form a bond that is never quite articulated. It could be sexual. It could be father/daughter (her absent father is French too). He wants her to show him the area as she knows it, but it is a flawed premise from the start:

“He’d never understand what Sokcho was like. You had to be born here, live through the winters. The smells, the octopus. The isolation.”

The isolation both geographical and individual lends the story a bleakness that verges on Gothic, despite all the neon lights. A trip to the border is downright eerie; the other guest in the hotel is permanently swathed in bandages as she recovers from cosmetic surgery.

The pressures on women and their appearance bear heavily on the narrator. Her mother chastises her for eating too little, and she seems to have body dysmorphia/an eating disorder. Her boyfriend leaves for Seoul for a modelling career, casually accepting he’ll undertake facial surgery if that is what is needed for work, and urging her to do the same.

Like so much else in her life, she seems to feel somewhat detached from her boyfriend. There is a sense of everything in her life being a step removed. She has no friends, her mother is suffocating yet pitable and distances with her need to be carefully managed. The narrator speaks with Kerrand in English despite her French being more fluent.  

As her involvement with Kerrand grows, she feels an ambivalence around his drawings of women, which never make it into his published work:

“In bed later, I heard the pen scratching. I pinned myself against the thin wall. An gnawing sound,  irritating. Working its way under my skin. Stopping and starting. I pictured Kerrand, his fingers scurrying like spiders legs, his eyes travelling up, scrutinising the model, looking down at the paper again, looking back up to make sure his pen conveyed the truth of his vision, to keep her from vanishing while he traced the lines.”

This ambivalence moves towards an ending that is wholly ambiguous. It could be read several ways and I remain unsure as to what I think happened. This isn’t remotely unsatisfying but entirely apt. Winter in Sokcho is a compelling exploration of the unknown: in ourselves, in others, and in the forces of history we all live with. How we reconcile ourselves to this is for the individual to discover. I think the narrator did find a way, I’m just not sure what it was…

“You may have had your wars, I’m sure there are scars on your beaches, but that’s all in the past. Our beaches are still waiting for the end of a war that’s been going on for so long people have stopped believing it’s real. They build hotels, put up neon signs, but it’s all fake, we’re on a knife-edge, it could all give way at any moment.”

25 thoughts on “Novella a Day in May 2023 – No.2”

  1. I really like how you’ve described the narrative voice in this novella. “Detached yet painfully intimate, ambiguous yet pragmatically clear” – that’s a great way of expressing it. This was one of my favourite reads from 2020, deep in the midst of the first COVID lockdown, a context that gave this enigmatic novella an extra layer of ambiguity. I loved the dreamlike mood of it…

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    • Thanks Jacqui. I can imagine reading it in lockdown really highlighted the isolation and slightly unreal quality. It is very dreamlike, especially the trip to the border I thought. Great to hear it was one of your favourite reads of the year back then!

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  6. I’ve had this one in the TBR stack for ages (allured by the gorgeous cover!).

    Incidentally, have just done a search for Stanley (your pick yesterday) – very hard to track down in Australia. Might need to start browsing some second hand book stores.

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  13. Pingback: “Keep the circus going inside you.” (David Niven) | madame bibi lophile recommends

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